This list is all about important strong female voices to know right now, so we won’t stand in their way. Get to know the five we think are shaping cultural conversations and offering the types of criticism we all need right now.
#womenwriters #futureisfemale #imwithher #culturalcrit #digitalmedia
@leahfinnegan
A former New York Times and Gawker editor who famously screamed at Nick Denton in a meeting (which, hero). From her excellent Longform podcast interview, “After the Condé Nast article, Nick Denton decided Gawker needed to be 20% nicer, and I took a buyout because I was not 20% nicer.” Now she’s at forthcoming The Outline (which the founder Joshua Topolsky explains is shaping up to be a collective of digital media wizards with blue chip resumes).
Read: The Leah Letter
Location: New York, NY
Followers: 1226
@lrsphm
A few weeks ago, the Internet met Matter Studios, which meant our Twitter feeds were hot pink with retweets and screenshots of the radical agency’s logo and party. Through one of those tweets, we got tipped off to a powerful piece by Larissa Pham, a writer precisely of the Twitter-age-of-things: Yale-educated in painting and history, by-lined in NY Mag, ELLE, Nerve, Vice, Gawker, The Hairpin, the you-can-guess-all-the-other-sites-because-they’re-the-ones-everyone-wants-to-write-for.
Read: The Industrial Design of Vibrators
Location: Brooklyn, NY
Followers: 1773
@rachsyme
Rachel Syme inspired this list with a Tweet soliciting recommendations for important female voices to consume, so she just has to be on it. She’s at the aforementioned Matter Studios busy being brilliant, and her Twitter serves up everything you need to be reading to understand digital media right now, both her own and from others.
Read: Selfie. It’s long and rich and so far from the navel-gazing topic the piece itself explores.
Location: New York, NY
Followers: 2,598
@jiatortellini
Jia Tolentino sorts her work into categories like “criticism” and “dumb” and “interviews” and “personal” and she’s as skilled at humorously inserting herself into a story as is she is being completely invisible in her own writing. She appreciably also has written about The OC, Emilio Estevez (Coach Bombay) and has written to Jonathan Chait.
Read: her movie review of The Handmaiden, which so beautifully employs the very best adverbs, it makes other parts of speech seem sad.
Location: New York, NY
Followers: 1980
@dstfelix
If you arrive early to drinks with a friend, or can’t sleep, look at Doreen St. Felix’s Twitter, as it promises several things: very recent posts, stream-of-consciousness, and articulation of opinions you may have had yourself or should hear anyway. With a mind so vast, it’s clear that other writers have a desire to understand how it works—she’s been interviewed loads, in Brooklyn Mag, i-D, Nylon, and so many more.
Read: The Ecstasy of Frank Ocean
Location: New York, NY
Followers: 2448
THE GET
